


but the fighter still remains

by marchingjaybird



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:16:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4705691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marchingjaybird/pseuds/marchingjaybird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was a boy, Herc Hansen's father taught him how to take a punch.</p>
<p>
  <i>Requested by <a href="http://beholdthebedlam.tumblr.com/">beholdthebedlam</a> on Tumblr</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	but the fighter still remains

When he was a boy, Herc Hansen’s father taught him how to take a punch.

“You’re gonna have to learn one way or another, boy,” Donnie Hansen told him. He was four beers into a six pack, boozy but not drunk, which was one of his better moods. He had Herc up against the fence in their tiny backyard, that little postage stamp of green that encompassed most of his world at the time.

“Keep your knees bent a little, like this… right, good, now tuck your chin, you wanna protect your neck, eh? Good lad, good lad. Now try to stay loose, right? If you tense up it just hurts worse. Watch my hand so you know where I’m aiming…”

Herc was a good boy, or he tried to be. He didn’t track mud into the house, he didn’t get in fights with other kids, he _never_ sassed his mother. He was smart and he was scrappy and he was gonna get out of this place, buy a new house where he didn’t have to share a room with his little brother and where his mum could have a maid so she didn’t have to spend so much time cleaning so she could laugh more.

And he idolized his father. Donovan Hansen was not, perhaps, an ideal father. He drank too much and kept everyone at arm’s length; even at the wise old age of six, Herc hardly knew anything about his father. He had a job in a factory, which he went to and brought money home from, but what exactly he did there was nebulous at best. When he was home, he drank beer and read old battered science fiction paperbacks and left his wife and two sons to their own devices.

Sometimes, though, he got it in his head to teach Herc something about the world. Herc loved those little lessons, cherished every single second that his father spent paying attention to him. So now, when Donnie said, “Loosen up, you ready?”, Herc nodded his head and his father’s fist snapped out and caught him just above the eye.

Everything seemed to happen all at once. The breath went out of Herc’s lungs and he sat down hard on the ground. His arms and legs felt like noodles, his stomach roiled, his head throbbed. Something dripped into his eye from somewhere, meeting the tears that were welling up, blurring his vision, though he still saw the face of his father, frozen in a rictus of horror. Oh, he was sober now!

Big hands had gripped his shoulders, his father’s low voice in his ears, “Don’t cry now, my boy, you’re a big boy, don’t cry” and the shrill sound of his mother’s distress, punctuated by Scott’s fearful sobbing. He was only a baby, he didn’t know what was going on, but Herc knew. If you cried, you were nothing, you were weak. If you cried, you might as well be a _girl_. So he swallowed the tears and sat bravely while the doctor put six stitches in his eyebrow and loyally told them that he and Dad had just been fooling around and it was an accident.

They bought him ice cream on the way home.

Donnie Hansen was the first person to lay Herc out, the first to leave him with a scar. He wasn’t the last on either count, nor was he the only one to do it out of a misguided sense of love. But Herc remembered what his father taught him that day, advice that fighting instructors repeated years later: stay relaxed, keep your legs flexed so you aren’t knocked off balance, tuck your chin, know where the blow is coming from, roll with the punch.

On screen, Striker’s dot winks out. There is silence in the room. No one looks at him. But he saw the blow coming, knows Chuck saw it too. The boy has always been a good fighter, better than his old man. He has a killer instinct. _Had_. In the instant before his son’s light blinks out for good, Herc feels his mind. Ghost Drifting, maybe, or just plain wishful thinking, but Chuck is there with him, clear as day, fierce and proud and frightened, and then he’s gone forever, that angry little boy that never forgave Herc for saving him and not his mother, that young man who grew up knowing only war and responded by attacking the world.

Herc starts to seek the solid presence of Stacker, the iron rod that has kept them all upright this long, and remembers with a shock of vivid pain. All in one blow, he’s lost his best friend and his son, his backbone and his heart. His legs turn to jelly beneath him, threatening to give way. He flexes his knees, tucks his chin. No weakness.

He does not cry.


End file.
